Photo: WeHeartIt
Don't feed the beast.
By Dori Hartley — Written on Jul 12, 2017
I missed out on whatever Covfefe is, and I heard something about a toy called a “spinner.” I didn’t get the memo on “Cash me ousside” and so I still don’t know what it means or why it’s important for us all to celebrate this in our lives. Trump, Putin, and Assange are all the same name to me.
I know there is a weekly need for the reading and sharing of tweeted explosions of fury and anger, but I haven’t paid attention.
I’m sure that over the last few weeks or months there have been loads of noisy social media topics that I didn’t pay any mind to, but I did notice one thing — whatever I missed out on was replaced the following week by something equally as banal and meaningless.
And always, at the heart of it all, is the blatant subtext that instructs us to hate it, talk about it, humiliate it, and destroy it with words. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Hate is the engine that runs social media. Hate is unfortunately what the world turns to now for inspiration, and it’s quite obvious that we thrive so much on it that we need to replenish it in weekly doses.
Facebook is incredibly tiresome now, especially when one’s news feed is made up of glaring boxes of color filled with self-important statements, all righteously demanding that we agree with or argue against what the user hates. I feel like I’m being challenged to a duel every time I scroll through my feed.
And so, I ignore, refuse, and block. I make a conscious choice to deny the noise of the endlessly yapping, hate-fueled world by not paying attention.
It’s not a case of “ignorance is bliss,” it’s a matter of choice. I choose to ignore.
“Pick your battles wisely,” they say.
The only bliss I experience is in knowing that I escaped some mass fear experiment that would have me sucking on to the exhaust pipe of social media in order to get my fill of the fumes.
I walked away for a week to see that the cycle had resumed anew, with the same fervor but slightly different topics. Or not.
What stands out is the timing — it all seems to wax and wane within a week’s time. One week it’s Trump, Putin, and Assange, the next week it’s Trump, Putin, and boys in make-up. Or spinners and autism. Or hipsters and man-buns. If you miss what happened this week, you’ll get a new variation on the theme next week.
What’s troubling isn’t so much the banality of the news, it’s the voraciousness of our appetite for it. The internet has instilled in us such a need for speed that we won’t be able to stand to wait a week for an update after a while.
It’s like microwave cooking. We used to be happy to wait throughout the eternal tediousness of baking a potato — now, when we chuck a spud into the nuker, we’re irate that it takes a whole nine minutes. “Nine minutes? I want this done in 3 seconds! What kind of trash technology is this?”
If one is addicted to social media as a news source, I envision that the one week turnover of events will turn into a serious jonesing for daily spin.
Bullsh*t topics like “Covfefe,” already ancient history, will be chewed up and spit out so rapidly that the dullness of the topic will require instant replacement — faster, faster, for the love of God, make it faster!
The entropy will eventually create within us a need to jump into the future so that we can know ahead of time which trite topic we need to ingest, because who would ever, ever want to miss out on this banquet of intelligence?
Perhaps we can someday be fitted with a chip that rushes worthless data into our brains at a lightning clip so that we may never have to do without constant input.
The entire world is now staring into the black mirror of a smartphone while composing hateful tweets, figuring out which new background color will best support their hateful message on Facebook while reposting memes which all go into the same virtual trash heap as did Grumpy Cat and Johnny Depp ‘wisdom.'
And somebody tell me, is Donald Trump still president or did that minute pass yet? (Trumpy Cat, anyone?)